Retirements and Reunions
by DragonGate
Summary: Many years ago, Aaron Hotchner's team swore to come back together when the last of them retired, no matter what. As Reid retires, the team reunites and soon must help their old friend capture a killer who eluded him seven years ago.
1. Chapter 1

Aaron Hotchner sipped an iced tea while Jack and his wife unpacked their car. Doing the occasional independent consulting and trying to write a book, retirement was treating him well.

"Dad! What's the count?" Jack was herding his three-year-old son towards the house.

"Spencer's the last one." He'd been tracking, as first Rossi had retired again, then the invites had flooded when Morgan and Prentiss and JJ had retired within the same six months of each other, his and JJ's grandchildren had been fast friends at the retirement party. Then they had trickled down sharply. Garcia had retired about eight months after JJ, to settle on a farm in rural Virginia with Kevin.

Jack nodded. "When's the last time you talked to him?"

Hotch had to think. Reid had called asking for advice the day that he'd been tapped for Team 3's unit chief, and couldn't avoid the promotion to Senior Supervisory anymore. That had been ten years ago. "Too long."

The phone started ringing in the house, and his daughter-in-law dashed inside. "I got it, Dad!"

Within minutes, she came out holding the cordless' handset. "It's a Supervisory Special Agent Seaver for you."

Hotch stood up. "Seaver?" Why would she be calling him? He took the phone and spoke, "Hotchner."

"Oh my god, you still answer the phone that way."

"Only because it was you, is this official?"

Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Sorta. The section chief's down in the bullpen giving Harris an eye. He's retiring in two months, and I think they'll have to drag him out kicking and screaming. But anyway, all the BAU teams are planning a retirement party for him. One of the other unit chiefs hacked his BlackBerry and got everybody's current numbers, he used to be a tech, long story. We're trying to surprise him with a party."

Hotch hesitated. "Who's the section chief now?"

They obviously weren't happy to see this one go, he still remembered the massive party the day Erin Strauss had retired. She had NOT been at that party. "You don't know? It's Reid."

Hotch counted on his fingers and realized that Reid would be 57 years old, and was probably being forced to retire. "You contacted everyone?"

"Morgan and Prentiss have confirmed they'll come, I left a message with Garcia, and I'm still hunting a good number for JJ, the one Reid had was no good."

He heard Reid and someone else talking in the background. Just snippets when they got near Seaver's office door. ". . . the thing we talked about, I can't keep pushing it . . ."

"Completely understood, sir. I'm going to take care . . ."

"It won't be easy, Law. Keep Seaver in the loop, it's her ass as much as yours, he's answered to both of you."

Seaver stopped talking until the voices were gone. Then she explained at a breakneck pace. "that was SSA Lawrence, the other chief."

Hotch nodded, even though Seaver couldn't see it. "Section chief, it's kind of hard to imagine."

"He's good at it, actually. So, are you in? He could use having everyone here for the retirement party. This isn't voluntary, and his applications for a year extension were denied."

"I'm sure he is, it's still, it's Reid. I'll be there. Are you trying to surprise Reid, if you are I won't call him."

"It's meant to be a surprise, but none of us can keep secrets from Reid. I don't think he'll notice this time though. He's fighting to choose his successor, but he's a victim of his own success. The Deputy Director of the NCAVC doesn't think of any of us unit chiefs are senior enough to replace Reid."

"That happens when you retire after over thirty years." Hotch knew from his own retirement that Reid would find himself with a battle to fight to choose his own successor.

After some catching up with her, Hotch hung up and called Morgan.

_Chicago, Illinois_

Morgan was marking his calendar. He hadn't seen Reid in years, and he was looking forward to spilling stories of the early days of the BAU's retiring Section Chief. His phone shrilled and chirped. He picked it up, waving his wife away as she laughed. "Derek here."

"It's Hotch."

"Long time, man, so Seaver called you."

"Hard to believe."

"Me and Emily knew they'd have to drag Reid out kicking and screaming."

"Seaver said the same thing."

"Involuntary, then?" Morgan did the math on his fingers, with their age difference, Reid would be 57 now. "He couldn't get extensions?"

"He's worked for the Bureau since he was 22, Morgan. They generally try to push people out before they break 30 years."

Morgan looked at the picture, colors faded with years, the entire team gathered at Rossi's second retirement party. They'd vowed, when the last member of the old team retired, to take another. And Dr. Spencer Reid was the last. "Seaver didn't mention how close he was."

"Two months, he's battling to make one of his unit chiefs his successor."

"Replacing Reid?" Morgan clicked his tongue. "Big shoes to fill. Obviously not literally."

"That's the problem. Deputy Director of NCAVC doesn't think any of them are senior enough. From what I can tell, nobody in the BAU's having any good riddance parties for him."

"They wouldn't. I bet Reid's an awesome section chief." Morgan had to ask. "You are coming, right?"

"I'll be there. When's the last time you talked to JJ?"

"Not since she retired. She works for GDI, but I have no idea what her number would be."

"Seaver and another unit chief hacked Reid's government cell and got our numbers. The one he had for JJ didn't work."

"I'll call Garcia. She still has a good system on her little farm in the dell. She'll find JJ. Prentiss is coming, she's meeting me in Chicago and then we'll travel together."

"Make sure Garcia knows about the retirement. Seaver left her a message."

"Oh, my babygirl will be there. She's not going to miss watching the kid retire. And I have stories to tell. His agents need to hear about his first crime scene."

"He's two months away from retiring, Morgan. He still needs to look his men in the eye." Hotch had to smile though. It would be good to see everyone, as a chapter truly closed with the entire team's little brother ending a 35 year career.

_Behavioral Analysis Unit, Quantico, Virginia_

Reid gave the stack of files on his desk a deep glare. There were times he felt sorry for Erin Strauss, epic bitch though she'd been. His neck felt it was constantly stretched out covering for Lawrence's team. They were the best, and they were eerily familiar.

There was kickass action girl Delolly, thin and waifish Harris with the heroin problem that Reid pretended he didn't know about, strong and tough Cooper. And they were all pains in the ass for a section chief, even with an outstanding case record. Yep, eerily familiar.

He hadn't wanted to know about Harris' addiction, it was too familiar. But once it was a done thing that he was being forced into retirement, he'd hit up a NA meeting, just to have the option. He still didn't know what he'd do with his retirement. Hotch had bought a nice little cabin on a lake, Rossi had written more books, Morgan had settled down back home, Prentiss had gone into the diplomatic corps, Garcia and Kevin had their farm, and JJ was head of PR for a corporation he couldn't recall.

Harris had tried desperately to hide on the opposite side of the room from his section chief, hands shaking with withdrawal and not able to get up and speak yet. Reid had done his agent the courtesy of anonymity, not acknowledging him, but indirectly dropping the message by speaking, sharing his fears of the unplanned years ahead. The head nods let him know he wasn't the only retiring LEO with no clue what came next.

And there was still the files. He could tell what ones that were supposedly Delolly's and Cooper's, and that Branthau and Harris had actually done. Branthau simply could not use one word when three would do, and Harris had a touch for the dramatic that no supervisor had been able to break from his writing style. In a way, both men knew they couldn't fool their psycholinguistics-among-other-talents boss, so they didn't try.

He read each at his famous speed and signed off on everybody's conclusions. Harris' handwriting had lost the tremor of someone on narcotics, and Reid's own eyes told him the young agent was fighting to break the habit before it cost him his job.

Hypocrisy had never been Reid, and he knew firing Harris for his addiction would make him the world's biggest one. He'd delay the drug test for the team another month, and he was sure Harris should be clean enough by then to pass. On one hand, he didn't like handing "little" problems like Harris over to someone else, but if he got his way, Lawrence would be section chief.

He walked to his dartboard and stuck a picture up on it. He had a small pile of ID card photos of everyone under him, and it was an awesome stress reliever, advice from a friend in counterterrorism known for never raising his voice to his agents. Cooper, Delolly, and the photo of Lawrence's entire team bore the most dart holes.

Satisfied with the placement of the picture, Reid started throwing darts at the picture of the Director of the FBI, who had twice refused Reid his requested extensions to the age of 58.

Down in the bullpen, Branthau and Harris split their working between consults and calculating the problem of a six-dimensional sphere's movements in three-dimensional space. Seaver had stopped trying to figure out their math about a half-hour ago. As each agent finished a file, he'd get up and add something to the whiteboard of math, or erase what the other one had done and re-do it. They finished their work faster than anybody else, and Chief Reid (she was still adapting to calling him that, even after he'd requested her when they'd lost an agent to counterintelligence) had all but endorsed them when he'd erased a chunk of their quantum displacement calculations and changed it with a variable they'd forgotten from an early episode of Doctor Who.

Branthau's computer started to squeal. "Ooh, ooh, ooh, one of the names I was watching just used her credit card. Seaver, ma'am!"

Seaver darted over to Branthau's desk, while the younger agent was busily scratching down a number. "You found JJ?"

"Office number, she works for Global Distribution Incorporated in their Public Relations department."

"You are the world's biggest geek, but thank you. Our chief will love seeing her again."

As Seaver walked away to make the call, Branthau got up and added to the equation. "Harris, you're not accounting for speed as a dimension!"

"We were counting speed as a dimension? It's not a dimension!"

"Hypothetically."

"And hypothetically I'm a blue orangutang!"

_New Orleans, Louisiana_

JJ was settling at her desk at GDI when her phone rang. Everybody in the company knew you did not call Jennifer Jareau anytime before 7, unless you were Will or Henry LaMontagne, Henry's wife or the grandkids. She picked up the phone, ready to bite a head off.

"Jennifer Jareau, VP Public Relations, this had better be good."

"It's Ashley Seaver."

"Seaver! It's been god knows how long. How are things, I heard you came back to the BAU a couple of years ago."

"Yeah, the section chief requested my return, speaking of which, are you able to come to a retirement party two weeks from this coming Saturday?"

"Who's-" JJ did the same math as her ex-teammates. "Spence is retiring?"

"Not because he wants to. The Bureau is making him."

"Yeah, well, I'm, yeah that would make Spence 57. Let's not talk about what that makes me."

"We're trying to surprise him with a party with all the old team. I say trying because the BAU has blabbermouths in it who owe Reid their job."

JJ laughed at the oh-so-young voice in the background. "I am not a blabbermouth!"

"Yes, you are, Harris. Can you come? It would mean so much to our retiring BAU Section Chief."

"Section chief? He's section chief? I did not know that, he should have told me!"

"Surprised me when I saw his signature on my transfer back here from counterterrorism. Nobody's throwing him any good-riddance parties."

Another voice in the background. "Actually, Cooper is planning a party. I think Delolly is bringing the drinks."

"Reid suspended those two cowboys because he had to, Branthau. And they were the first people he'd ever suspended in almost 20 years of being higher management. They were lucky they weren't fired."

"I know that, I'm just saying they'll be happy to see him go."

JJ smiled, listening to the banter of a new generation of eager young profilers. Seaver beat them both down. "They won't be when they realize that we might not get one of the unit chiefs to replace him. He's fighting, well."

"Seaver, I'll be there."

"Everybody else has confirmed too, I just need to get a positive from Garcia."

"I have a number for her."

"756-555-3924?"

"That one is no good."

"Damnit, our chief had two bad numbers in his CrackBerry."

"You got numbers out of Spence's BlackBerry?"

"My co-conspirator, SSA Lawrence, is a former tech analyst. Reid left his phone unattended for ten minutes in the BAU's kitchenette."

JJ laughed again, she had to call Pen pronto. The group had sworn years ago to all meet when their last person retired. To nobody's surprise, that was Reid.

_Rural Virginia_

Garcia blinked at the ringing phone. That particular phone rarely rang anymore. Kevin came in, wiping mud off his hands. "The Bat-Phone."

"The only people who have that number now are JJ and Emily." Garcia picked it up, wondering what could have happened to have one of them call.

"Pen, it's JJ. Spence is finally retiring."

Garcia did a happy dance right there. "Our baby genius is retiring! Oh, my God, I have to be there! Even if I feel very old right now."

"I dare you to call him that in front of his agents. He's the section chief of the Behavioral Analysis Unit now."

"He took Strauss' job?"

"There were people between, but yeah."

"I will be there! When's the party?"

"Two weeks from this coming Saturday. Seaver and a SSA Lawrence are making the plans behind Spence's back."

After hanging up, Garcia bopped happily around her kitchen. One last party with the whole team, she couldn't wait two weeks, she simply couldn't. "Kevin, sweetie, I have to head for Quantico."

_Commack, New York_

Rossi was deep in writer's block when his phone rang. He grabbed it up and stared at the caller ID before speaking. "Aaron, it's been a couple of years."

"My excuse is grandkids. Did Ashley call you?"

"Not yet." Rossi was focusing on the computer, trying his hand at writing fiction. It wasn't working so well.

"Reid's finally retiring. 35 years if my math's right, and they're making him."

Rossi tapped his pen against the keyboard. "I did say Reid and you would have to be dragged out by your hair before anybody could give you your gold watches."

"And you were right. Seaver works under him, and she's working with another agent to plan a party. Everybody is coming."

"When's the party, and when does he actually retire?"

"Party is two weeks from Saturday, Dave, and he retires in two months."

"You know nobody is going to be there on that Saturday. Don't you want to see him in action as section chief?"

"I remember being a retiring section chief, Dave. He's probably very busy closing his load."

"And wrestling over who replaces him. Erin fought tooth and nail against you getting the job."

"Reid is fighting to make sure one of his unit chiefs does. I imagine everybody will be in Virginia early."

Rossi clucked his tongue and shook his head. "I just had a horrible thought."

"What?"

"If the same people who knew me as a green FBI agent were able to get to the people I was in charge of the first time I retired."

"And that's why everybody will be in Quantico earlier than the day of the party. Morgan is already determined to start telling stories."

Rossi looked thoughtfully at a very old picture, back when it was called the Behavioral Science Unit. "What about Jason?"

"Do _you_ have any idea where he is? He hasn't called on me in 30 odd years."

"He'd want to be there." Rossi was looking at that picture.

"If he's alive."

"I'm sure he is. Then I'll see you in Virginia, Aaron."

"Somebody has to tell the other side of whatever version of his career Reid's told his agents." Hotch hung up. Rossi looked at the picture they'd taken, at his second retirement. It was hard to imagine the awkward young man who'd been wearing a Halloween mask when he first met him, and quoted his books verbatim, retiring a 35-year-veteran section chief. He'd watched Reid grow up through his twenties, but hadn't seen him since Rossi himself had retired again.

_One week later_

Morgan and Prentiss got off the plane at Dulles International, immediately recognizing Seaver despite the years. She was pleased to see them, but she had something on her mind.

Prentiss hugged the younger woman. "God, it's been too long, you look good!"

"Thanks, you do too."

And Morgan felt his "Reid alert" going off. "Something's up."

Seaver bit her tongue unconsciously and gestured them out. "You haven't lost your skills. Let's talk about it in the SUV. It hasn't hit the news and we want to keep it that way."

In the SUV, Seaver explained what had happened. "Unit Chief Dallas Colt and his team went to Topeka Falls, Montana to help capture a five-time serial cop killer. Colt was shot and killed during a standoff with the unsub 5 hours ago. I just put my section chief, on a plane, a commercial flight to get to Montana as fast as humanly possible."

Prentiss stumbled, and it had nothing to do with age. The entire thing so screamed "Spencer Reid" she could have cried. "And they know he's coming?"

"If they could meet him on the tarmac, they would. They just lost a unit chief, they're feeling a little paranoid about taking responsibility for a retiring section chief."

Morgan shook his head. "I can't blame them."

It was something of a thrill to clip on Visitor badges as Seaver brought them through security. "Now, you're going to see some familiar people. Unbeknownst to you, you were cloned by the Bureau, and their names are Cooper and Delolly, and they are the only people Spencer Reid has had to suspend in twenty years of FBI management positions."

"The cloning didn't work right if they did something to get _Reid _to yank their badges." Morgan immediately saw what she meant as he scanned the bullpen.

Delolly jumped up to defend herself. "The only reason Chief Reid suspended us-"

Seaver interrupted. "Was because you and Cooper slammed a paranoid psychotic into the hood of a police car sixteen times. If I was your boss I would have _fired_ you two. Luckily for you, you work for Lawrence, not me."

He spotted two agents poring over a whiteboard covered in undecipherable math. They turned to look and immediately came over. The heavy-set one offered his hand. But it was the thin agent that caught Morgan's eye, and the track scars on his exposed elbow crook. "Special Agent Tim Branthau, you must be Derek Morgan. And this is-"

"Special Agent Daniel Harris." Harris kept his eyes downcast and rolled his sleeves down in a hurry as he offered his pale hand to shake. Prentiss took the cold hand.

"Emily Prentiss, Derek and I both used to work with your section chief, way back when."

Harris nodded. "We know, he talks about you guys, a lot. Usually in the context of 'what Morgan and/or Prentiss would have done.' "

Morgan beamed. "Well, I'm flattered."

Prentiss stepped aside with Branthau. "We're very sorry for your loss."

Branthau nodded. "It's still hard to believe Colt's dead. The round went right through his vest, according to Feldspar's incident report."

She looked at the whiteboard, covered in the scrawls that had something to do with a sphere and that was as far as she could tell. "And of course, Reid goes galloping out there within six hours."

"That's why he's a good section chief, ma'am."

Prentiss had to laugh. "I can see that. He probably still had a go bag in his office."

Branthau gave a confirming eye take. "His driver didn't have to go by the house, I know that."

_Topeka Falls, Montana_

Reid got off the plane, dragging a roller suitcase behind him and his famous messenger bag. His agents had a betting pool over what exactly he carried in it, and he'd told them the day he retired that he'd confirm who was right. That had been ten years ago, and he was sure the ones who remembered the bet would hold him to it.

SSA Bellamy and SSA Walker were waiting as close to the security checkpoint as they'd been able to get, even their badges hadn't got them past the checkpoint this time. Bellamy walked rapidly up, his coat laying over a heavy Glock. "Sir, I wish these were better circumstances to have you in the field with us."

Reid nodded. He'd handpicked Dallas for the job, and felt responsible. "I read the case file on the plane, where did Mathers head after the shootout?"

_BAU, Quantico, Virginia_

Morgan and Prentiss were sitting in the old conference room with Lawrence and Seaver. Lawrence's head rested on his arms. "I'm acting section chief, I always am when Chief Reid isn't present."

Morgan looked around the room, of course it had changed with the march of technology. "This normal for him?"

"For him, pretty much." Lawrence toyed with a chair. "Chief Reid would go to the mat for any of us."

"Harris?" Morgan wished he hadn't asked the moment he said it. Lawrence looked away.

"He gave me the opportunity to save the life of one of my agents, he stuck his neck out and took a risk. I don't know why he did it and I didn't ask."

Morgan thought back, to watching Spencer Reid self-destruct those hard few months after Hankel so long ago. Prentiss looked at him and nodded. Finally she touched the young unit chief's hand. "There's some deep reasons why, Agent Lawrence."

Seaver glanced at Lawrence. It definitely wasn't easy, they had ransacked Harris' apartment and confiscated his stash. As far as they could tell, he hadn't used for a while, but they couldn't risk him being caught with that much heroin. Harris was her problem too, having worked for both of them at one time or another in the BAU while he was using.

Over the next hours, they trickled in one by one. Seaver and Lawrence took responsibility of their guests, getting everyone into one hotel.

Hotch and Rossi watched each other across a table. Rossi tipped back a straight scotch. "I can see the worry on your wrinkled, old face, Aaron, spill."

"What do you think Strauss would have done if I'd been killed on the job?"

"Had a party?" Rossi deadpanned, then went on. "Reid is no kid, he knows damn well what he's doing. He lost a man today, and he's covering the loss of one of his senior agents by throwing himself at the problem. Do I need to remind you who he learned leadership from, Aaron?"

Hotch gave Rossi a glare. "Strauss went with the team to Milwaukee."

"She was trying to build enough against you to fire you or force you out. Reid went because they needed him and he knew it."

The room lightened when Morgan, Prentiss, Garcia and JJ all came down to join them. JJ waved in the general direction of the doors. "Lawrence and Seaver had to head back to the BAU in a hurry."

The group knew they shouldn't, but they looked to the Breaking News.

"-as we continue to narrow down Reginald Mathers' location and fully intend to take him with no casualties-"

"Agent Cassidy, Agent Cassidy! Don't you mean further casualties, can you confirm or deny the report that Special Agent Dallas Colt was killed during the first encounter with Mathers?"

"I can't make any comment on that prior to formal Bureau notifications."

"And what about reports that the head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit has come to Montana in person?"

"I can't talk about the whereabouts of senior FBI management employees."

"So BAU Section Chief Spencer Reid _is in_ Montana then?"

"If you want to believe that, Mr. Corlias, you are welcome to think that senior FBI officers came out on routine cases. We are continuing to function and will capture Reginald Mathers' peacefully."

JJ drained her water. "She's not bad, but she's green."

Garcia shook her head. "Oh God, my kiddo walking into that."

_Topeka Falls_

Reid didn't have to like it. They knew where Mathers was, but he could feel the gunshy edge on the team. The bastard was heavily armed, and their FBI vests no longer stopped the newest weapons.

Cassidy walked in, shaking her head. "I hope you don't have enemies, sir. That son of a bitch reporter Matt Corlias had to all but broadcast that you came here."

"Yeah, can't be helped." He smoothed the map in front of him and started re-calculating a geographic profile, while handling the job that Colt's murder had vacated. "He's not going to go back to same place, he's been smart and fairly unpredictable so far, and he's unlikely to change that even if killing a FBI agent makes him bolder."

Walker shook his head. "His grandmother owns a place five miles out of town, if he'll hole up anywhere, that'd be it."

Reid was looping string on the pins on the map, while Bellamy scratched figures at a breakneck pace, double checking the algorithms on paper that their section chief could do in his head.

One thing was obvious. Reid shook his head. "Five miles is a long way to travel when every cop within a 100 mile radius is looking for you. He will go absolutely no farther than he has to, and he wants another confrontation."

Bellamy looked at the map, scanning it over with flicking eyes. "That warehouse on Spring, it's in the comfort zone and he wouldn't have to leave the Topeka Falls city limits to get there. Big enough to booby trap with the kind of time he's had to plan another shootout with us."

Reid had to concur with the younger profiler. Except for one thing. "We won't let there be another shootout, Bellamy."

The six finished off dinner just as Seaver and Lawrence returned. Lawrence twirled a chair around and sat down on it. "They've locked down the area around a warehouse they believe Mathers has set up as a fallback. It's in his comfort zone and in the city limits."

Morgan nodded. "He won't travel far, every cop in the area is looking for him and they know who he is."

"That's what the chief and Bellamy calculated. Oh, SSA Bellamy is one of our best geographic profilers, pretty good head for math and good with maps."

Rossi couldn't imagine the man in front of him being old enough to be a unit chief, but he had to remember how old he was now.

Hotch sipped at his drink. "Your agents do know your section chief's tendencies, right?"

"Taking off his kevlar and walking out to negotiate. I've heard the stories, but he hasn't actually had opportunity to pull that in years."

The entire old team looked around the table. A man who was being forced into retirement after 35 years on the job could be even more unpredictable than the normal unpredictable of Spencer Reid.

Lawrence and Seaver weren't profilers for nothing. "They won't let Chief Reid do anything stupid, not after losing Colt."

And Morgan really couldn't imagine Reid listening to people who worked FOR him any better than he had listened to Hotch over the years.

They were right about the warehouse, Reid wouldn't have expected anything else from Bellamy's calculations.

"Reginald Mathers, you are completely surrounded." The local cops were out for blood. Reid decided to let himself be old and cantankerous for a moment as he reached the bullhorn.

"I can get him to surrender without more bloodshed, Detective. Let me talk to him, it'll go easier. You mind?" Not that he cared, except for trying not to ruffle local feathers. The officer handed it over, unwilling to argue with the team's dead boss' boss. Reid smiled internally. _Rank hath its privileges_.

The BAU team tensed, wondering whether or not they were going to have to talk their superior out of something dangerously stupid.

Reid glared at his agents watching him and started talking. "Reginald, nobody else has to get hurt. My name's Spencer, I'm with the FBI."

Finally they got a response from Mathers. "I know who you are! I'm not coming out, you'll kill me for killing your agent."

"No, we won't, because that's not how we do things. Just come out and we can talk about this. I promise nobody will shoot you."

"I'm not coming out. You come in here instead!"

Reid sighed and grabbed SSA Feldspar's arm. "You're with me, Feldspar. We are taking Mathers alive."

He'd been Colt's second, and was used to being a devil's advocate. "You're doing something colossally stupid, sir."

"You should have seen what I did during the Savage case. We're bringing Mathers in." Before Bellamy and Walker could come up with a good argument, Chief Reid had holstered his revolver and started walking.

The warehouse was dark and shadowed as Feldspar got ahead of his chief and cleared the immediate area. Reid searched the dark. "Reginald? You close?"

"Your weapons, drop 'em."

"Reginald, I can't do that. Can you see me? You'll have to forgive me, I'm old and my eyes aren't what they used to be."

Feldspar kept his Glock ready to use, only slightly lowered. The warehouse was damn dark, even if he knew the chief was bullshitting about his eyes. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, behind a stack of junk. "Reginald, that you?"

"Stay back! I've got a 301 that'll go right through your kevlar!"

Reid raised his hands unthreateningly. "I know that, Reggie, can I call you Reggie? Why do you think my weapon's holstered, I know it won't do any good."

"Damn right, I mean, how many other people can kill a FBI agent and get away? Me, that's who! They said I couldn't pull this off, you know."

"They were obviously wrong, Reggie, who said you couldn't do it?"

"They did, the people." Mathers had moved from behind his cover, and Feldspar was ready to shoot, but Mathers' rifle wasn't raised.

Reid kept his tone gentle, if Colt's team's profile was right the "people" were in Reginald Mathers' mind. "But you don't have to prove those people wrong, Reggie. You don't really want to do this, and the only way this can end for you is badly if you keep trying to prove them wrong."

"But I have a gun."

"There's two dozen cops outside with guns, you can't kill them all and they will kill you if you give them the slightest justification, Reggie. I want to end this peacefully, they don't. I want to help you."

Feldspar was tense on the trigger, determined not to lose another of his superiors, as the noisy clatter of a rifle being dropped sounded piercingly loud in the warehouse.

As Mathers came out of the shadows, Reid reached a hand out and Feldspar quickly snapped the cuffs off of his belt without lowering his Glock. "Oh, you can put that down now, Feldspar." The agent could only shake his head as his boss locked the cuffs on Mathers' wrists. "We're going to get you the help you need, Reggie."

The old team stood up when Lawrence walked in. "The situation's been ended peacefully, Chief Reid and the team are returning tonight. I'd like to arrange a surprise, if you guys would come back to headquarters with me."

Rossi raised an eyebrow. "Surprising Reid won't be easy."

Lawrence grinned. "I think me and Seaver have pulled it off, sir."

Prentiss laughed. "I doubt you have, Agent Lawrence."

JJ and Garcia both nodded in agreement with Prentiss.

Reid had his dark glasses on and the lights in his section turned down low. Bellamy was nearby reading a Applied Psychology textbook. "Migraine again, sir?"

"Am I that obvious?" Reid looked over the top of his sunglasses.

"Maybe they'll get better when you're sitting on a lake throwing a line in the water without a care in the world."

"I'll go nuts. I have no clue what to do with retirement." Reid pushed his glasses up.

Feldspar looked up from the card game he was playing with Walker and that Reid had declined. "Please don't, sir, if you went nuts and started killing, it'd take Jason Gideon himself to catch you, with a side of David Rossi."

Reid laid back and tried to sleep. "Probably, and don't forget Hotch. He always knew what I was going to do next. Even when it was suicidal and stupid."

The plane touched down hours later and the weary team filed off. Seaver and Lawrence were waiting as Reid tossed his roller bag in the back of the SUV. "Everybody, stop by the BAU, do any _small_ last minute things you need to and head home, tomorrow will be a long day."

The team nodded all around. Lawrence opened the door as Reid climbed in. "How's Jeanine handling it?"

"She was an Army wife for ten years before Dallas joined the Bureau, sir. She's handling."

"I want to see her, if she'll talk to me."

Harris raced back in the glass doors and called up. "Places, people! The chief's coming back! Branthau, would you erase the warp drive calculations or something. He's coming back with a migraine and we know Chief Reid with a migraine equals changing our math."

Morgan was propped on Agent Cooper's desk. The young man snorted. "Just what we need. Him with a migraine is like having a fucking dragon in the BAU."

Branthau dropped a handful of files back on Cooper's In box. "Hey, Coop, I think you _misplaced_ these earlier."

A hostile look crossed briefly between the two agents, then was wiped out when a pair of twenty-something year old ladies with brown hair came in, perfect images of each other. And Morgan would know those girls anywhere, seeing as how he'd pushed their father into first talking to their mother and they looked just like her. "Ada and Karen Reid, the two most beautiful young ladies in my life."

Ada flipped her brown hair back. "Please, Uncle Derek, your flattery got old ten years ago. Where's my dad?"

Harris grinned. "He's coming back in a little while, Ada, they closed the situation in Montana."

Morgan put his finger to his lips. "Your dad doesn't know I'm in town, Ada."

She looked up the conference room. "Might want to pull those blinds, then, I see Aunt Penny, Aunt Emily, Uncle David, Uncle Aaron."

"All right, smartypants. You girls are dangerous, you know that?"

Karen, the older twin, laughed. "Of course we are, we have Mom's looks and Dad's brains."

Lawrence ran in. "If Spencer Reid does not know you're here-, Ada!"

Ada giggled and waved. "Matt!"

"I did not know you and your sister were in town, let me take you to dinner sometime."

"Dad would shoot you." Ada and Karen followed Morgan upstairs.

"Ada Reid, your dad could have my badge for lunch with gun on the side and pension as relish if it meant I had a dinner date with you. Anyway, if Spencer Reid doesn't know you're here, go hide in the conference room."

The entire group waited breathlessly in the conference room with the blinds drawn as they caught up unexpectedly with the Reid twins. Hotch was talking with Karen. "How's the practice working out?"

"Getting my feet underneath me, but a disturbing number of people around the Beltway know my dad."

Ada was peeking through the blinds. Prentiss tapped her shoulder. "And what have you been up to?"

"Oh, the normal. Finishing my literature PhD, convincing my dad to let me help him write a book."

Morgan laughed. "You think your dad needs help, Ada?"

"He ought to write a book, 35 years with the Bureau, there's got to be pages of interesting things there."

Lawrence signaled up from the bullpen as the glass doors opened and Reid walked in with the team.

Seaver handed him a file as soon as he hit the mezzanine stairs. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we need you in the conference room. It's very important."

He looked at her and shoved his glasses higher. "Could you tell someone to turn the lights down?"

He looked behind him and shook his head, of course his agents had cleared a wide path when he came in. The dark glasses gave it away, and he long ago had accepted that profiling your boss was a basic survival strategy in an office. Seaver shrugged apologetically. "I'll get someone to do that, Reid."

He had the case file in front of his face, as Lawrence took the steps two at a time to see his careful scheme pay off. Had they actually pulled one on Spencer Reid?

As he walked in, the group stood up. Lawrence and Seaver crossed their fingers.

Reid lowered the case file. And smiled. "Hey guys, I thought Seaver was lighting up the phone tree lately. It's good to see everybody."

Lawrence kicked the carpet. "Damnit, we didn't get one over on you, did we, sir?"

Reid shook his head, as the group came together for a hug.

"I have so many stories to start telling. The elevator, the club-"

"Morgan, I retire in two months! Would you mind not corrupting my agents with all my bad moments."

Hotch laughed. "Don't worry about it too much, Reid. I'll balance him out."

Prentiss nodded. "Me, too."

Lawrence rested his head on his hands. "I want to hear the elevator story."

Morgan grinned. "There we were, investigating a case in Portland, Oregon. We had to check the apartment of a victim, and Hotch goes up the stairs."

Hotch nodded. "I could have told you guys there was something wrong with that elevator."

Morgan rolled his eyes. "So your boss and I cram into this little rattletrap elevator, and it fails between floors. Apparently there were six elevator related deaths a year and ten thousand injuries, so Reid informed me. We hit the emergency alarm, and we weren't getting any help. So your boss there starts panicking-"

"I wasn't panicking, Morgan, you were panicking, I was concerned."

"-flapping his hands, thinking I'm going to pry the doors open like Superman. Then the elevator drops from beneath us, and we both yelled for Hotch. I yelled, your boss squeaked!"

Reid forced himself to stand up. "All right, that's it. Let's go back to you guy's hotel before you corrupt the only good agent I've got. Not talking about you, Lawrence."

Seaver beamed at her partner in crime while Lawrence shook his head and walked out.

Ada and Karen dashed out ahead of their father.

In the hotel's dining room, Reid and Hotch raised glasses together. He nodded his head at the younger man. "Here's to the years, Reid. I would never have imagined your career ending here back when Jason introduced you to me."

"To the years and the job."

"That was good work, in Montana, we ended up following the case by accident."

Reid nodded, his thoughts elsewhere. "Colt's widow is taking it fairly well. I handpicked him for that job, Hotch."

He nodded. "People have told me you're a bit of a control freak with regards to the BAU leadership."

Hotch remembered a time when Reid would have tripped over himself denying it. The man before him nodded in acknowledgment. "I know who I want to lead the teams, and I always get what I want. My luck seems to be running out, though. They don't think any of my unit chiefs are senior enough for my job."

"Hard to replace a 35-year veteran profiler who was trained by the best."

"I want Lawrence to replace me, I always pass the job to him when I need someone to pinch hit anyway, he knows what it takes to lead."

"And I imagine you have an opinion about who replaces him as unit chief?"

"Seaver will take over his team, he knows and I know she's the best for the position, none of his agents are ready and she's already familiar with their situations." Reid shook his head. "Maybe I am a control freak, but I'd like to think it's for the greater good of the unit."

"You did the right thing, immediately covering down on one of your teams when they lost a leader."

"And I did it without infuriating the local cops." He paused as the twins were headed over. "Though there are times I feel sorry for Strauss. I'm paying for my training with some of my agents now, Hotch. I can't imagine why you didn't fire me 30 years ago."

Rossi sat down to join them. "You were young."

Reid sighed. "I would have fired me."

Hotch raised his glass. "It's a good thing you weren't in charge of you, then, Reid."

Seaver and Lawrence crashed like a wave on their tech analyst. He turned around and took off his sequined glasses. "What the hell do you guys want?"

"How hard would it be to track someone down?"

"That depends. Is someone trying to hide?"

"Probably."

"Who is it?"

"Jason Gideon."

The tech analyst snorted. "How about y'all give me something easy, like D.B. Cooper! I'll see what I can do, and I suppose you'd like to find him in time to come here for Chief Reid's retirement party."

Lawrence leaned down and pecked the analyst on the cheek. "You are wonderful, you know that?"

"Oh, don't get my hopes up, Law, you straight man you. If I can't find anything-"

A cheerful voice called from the door. "I will."

They turned to see Penelope Garcia. Seaver shook her head. "You should be at the hotel."

"No, because you guys are still scheming. I am the all-knowing goddess of technology yet, spill!"

"We'd like to get Jason Gideon here for Reid's retirement party."

Garcia knew Gideon hadn't been heard from in years, he hadn't even put in a peep as his long ago protege had climbed each big step of leadership. Would he come back for the retirement if he knew about it?

Well, Penelope Garcia was going to find him and give him the chance! "You."

The analyst looked at her, and took in the too-colorful clothing and wild glasses. "My name is Rawlins, and you have to be Penelope Lynch."

"Lynch, Garcia, whichever name you prefer. I'm going to help you find some people who will want to see my boy genius retire."

Lawrence choked, imagining his boss as anybody's 'boy genius.' Seaver chuckled, remembering back to her brief year with the BAU.

The party had quieted, as Prentiss finished her drink and sat with Reid. "We haven't seen each other since Garcia retired, have we?"

"No, we haven't." Reid spun his drink slowly. Ada and Karen had gone to bed, citing homework.

"I should have been there for the funeral, Reid." Prentiss shifted in her seat, she had sent flowers after Morgan and Hotch had separately sent her notice that Austin Reid had died.

"It was quiet, a small funeral. The twins took a semester off from Harvard and Georgetown to stay with me in Virginia. People were worried, I guess." Reid sipped at his drink.

"I would have been." She still remembered long talks between her and still-working Morgan when Austin had died, and the BAU's concerns over the combination of a grieving unit chief and a .357 revolver.

"It's been a few years, I can have the family photos on my desk again without getting too upset."

"You don't wear a ring anymore." Prentiss changed her position again. She'd chucked that opportunity a long time ago, amidst the maelstorm of Doyle, and yet, she could see that Reid hadn't worn his wedding band for a while, enough for the marks and ring tan to fade.

"I took it off when I started dating again at the twin's insistence. It didn't go anywhere, but I didn't put my ring back on. Still, I miss her." He looked up quite suddenly. "And swear to God if Morgan tells the story how we met, I will kill him. My agents will cover it up."

"Okay, what do your agents and the twins think happened?"

"They, meaning everyone, know the part where we saved her from the unsub. They don't know about me in the club doing magic tricks."

Prentiss laughed and wanted to reach for his hand. "How the hell did you put a business card behind her barrette?"

"That, Emily, is a trade secret. I'm not telling."

She leaned back in her chair and drained a beer. "All these years and you still have some surprises in you, Doctor Reid."

"I try."

Between Garcia, Rawlins, and Lawrence's tech know-how, they had contact information for the last known place Jason Gideon had settled himself.

Elle Greenaway had been far easier to find. Garcia waved the younger FBI folks away to make the phone call.

"Hello?"

"Elle, honey, is that you?"

"Garcia?"

"Long time, sweet cheeks."

"You're still working?"

"Me, oh, no, no, Elle, I'm long retired with my honey on a little farm. The only one still working is Reid, and he's retiring. The party is next Saturday."

Garcia heard the long pause on the other end. "Is everybody there?"

"Everybody but Gideon, Elle, it would mean so much . . ."

"I can't, Garcia, but I'll send something."

Garcia sighed, looking at the phone as Elle hung up. "0 for 1 now."

She made the next call, hoping that Gideon would want to come, for their boy genius' sake.

A quiet lake somewhere in Montana, it was the perfect place to leave a hard world behind. Gideon sipped a beer as he cast a line into a lake with no fish. It was perfect.

Of course, he still watched the news, and considering the brutal events in Topeka Falls, not 50 miles away, he hadn't been able to miss Reid's last act of bravery in the line of duty.

At least, Gideon was relatively sure it was to be the last. His math told him that Reid had turned 57 recently, and his late arrival on the scene in Montana, in conjuncture with the death of a senior field agent, told Gideon that Reid was probably section chief, even if the news hadn't have said so.

The phone in the cabin ringing broke the peaceful reverie as Gideon laid his fishing pole down and went to answer, few people had this number nowadays.

"Hello."

He heard a deep breath on the other end, so familiar. "Sir, I know this is a shock."

"Garcia." Her voice was older, of course, whose wouldn't be?

"Yes, sir, it's me. We had a hell of a time finding you, but it's nothing bad. Reid is retiring, and I know he'd be honored to have you at the party. Everybody else is here in Quantico to catch up."

"Retiring, I thought he would be about now. When's the party, and when's his last day?"

"The party's on Saturday, and he's retiring in two months."

Gideon looked at the empty space on his calendar. "I'll be there."

Garcia squealed as she hung up, sounding like a woman decades younger. "He's coming! Jason Gideon is going to be there for our kiddo!"

Ada and Karen were cloistered with JJ. Karen, barely the older by 17 minutes, was doing her best impersonation of an interrogator. "Come on, Auntie JJ, just tell us! What were they back then?"

"Who again? I'm old, I forget these things." JJ was not going to answer the girl's questions easily, even if Henry had made most of his pocket money as a teenager babysitting his godfather's twins.

Ada butted in. "Dad and Aunt Emily! I know I got my middle name from her, but there's something there, that definitely wasn't there when we were little."

She leaned back in the chair. "A long time ago, your Aunt Emily died. The team thought she was dead, it was the only way we could protect her. I don't know what your dad did or didn't feel for her, but he spent months grieving for her."

Karen nodded. "He doesn't take grief well. We both came home, after Mom died."

JJ had a far away look. She remembered when Austin Reid had died. There'd been enough of the team around to keep an eye on Reid back then.

But the twins were not letting themselves be distracted. "So you think Dad loved her back then?"

JJ shook herself back to the present. "Love would be the wrong word. It could have been, but you have to understand how young your dad was back in those days. We were family, and your dad was the little brother. He was cute, but he just wasn't date-able, and the FBI has rules against that kind of thing."

Ada and Karen tried to imagine their dad as a little anything and couldn't. They broke into giggles unbecoming a nascent lawyer and a literature PhD.

By the time the old folks had one by one wandered to bed and the Reids were headed for the car, Ada and Karen were scheming.

In the childhood room they had temporarily taken back over while home visiting, they planned.

Ada twiddled a long strand of the dark hair she inherited from her mother, while Karen went into court mode "All right, facts in evidence. One, we know Dad felt something for Aunt Emily way back when. Two, she is no longer an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Three, he's much older than he was back then. Ten years isn't a big deal when you're both old, right?"

Ada nodded. "Of course, I mean how much older can she be?"

Karen thought about it. " I think Aunt Emily is ten years older than Dad."

Ada shook her head. "Well, that's nothing. One of my professors married a girl like, thirty years younger than him, seriously!"

"All right, so we agree than ten years is nothing when you're both old. How do we get them to see that?"

Ada grinned. "We launch Operation Stepmom."

Karen buried her face in a pillow to muffle her laughter. "Operation Stepmom failed miserably ten years ago."

"Dad wasn't ready for Operation Stepmom, we were a little hasty and really wanted a mom."

"And what do we want now?"

"For Dad to be happy in retirement."

"And Aunt Emily would be a cool stepmom."

Garcia was waiting, bringing the almost last piece of the puzzle in was her surprise and nobody was going to ruin it as she bundled herself up in a multi-colored coat and a bright neon red scarf.

Lawrence was antsy to meet the legend himself, the man who had taught Chief Reid everything he knew.

Gideon had kept up on the actions of the BAU over the past thirty years, watched from afar as the student had surpassed the disappeared teacher. He gave Garcia genuine smile as he made his way across the airline terminal with a hardwood cane. "Garcia, it's been too long."

She impulsively hugged him. "I just hope he's happy to see you, too."


	2. Chapter 2

Lawrence was tongue-tied as he drove them from the airport. In the backseat, Garcia and Gideon caught up on the missed decades and talked about recent happenings.

"I still can't believe he did that! Were you watching the news?" Garcia waved her painted fingernails as she talked. "He could have been shot! You'd think he'd stop giving me heart attacks as old as he is now."

Gideon rested a hand on the window glass, worried about how Reid would actually react to him. Maybe he shouldn't have come. "I was only about 50 miles away from Topeka Falls."

"You were?"

"And everyone's going to be there?"

"They're already here. I, we, managed to find Elle, but she didn't want to come." Garcia shifted in her seat. "I know Reid will be happy to see you."

"I hope you're right."

Lawrence pulled up at the front door of the hotel and got out. He hoped his chief was happy to see Jason Gideon, too. If not, he'd disavow all knowledge of being involved.

Reid unlocked his office door and flicked on the lights. Today, he swore he was going to start taking things down from his walls. The party was on Saturday, and that was the beginning of the downhill slide. And he still didn't know what he would do with the next. Ada and Karen would no doubt stay on the east coast for the foreseeable future, and he had the house. There wasn't any rush to move back to Nevada.

He picked the tablet computer up off his desk as he heard a rap on the door. "Come in."

Lawrence pushed the door open. "Morning, sir. I've got those case files from the Seattle field office you wanted me and Branthau to look at."

Reid took the short stack of files. "Ah, Seattle, I remember going there, long time ago."

"Vogel, right, sir?"

"Good memory, that case was over thirty years ago. Were you even born yet, Lawrence?"

"I think I was in high school, sir."

Reid started reading the case files. "Now I know how Rossi felt when he first meet me."

If there was one thing Emily Prentiss loved about vacations, it was the ability to wake up whenever the hell you wanted to.

Or at least until an old friend started banging on your door. Prentiss forced herself to sit up as she tried to stretch stiff old muscles. "JJ, do you have any idea what time it is?"

Her voice was muffled through the door. "How'd you know it was me, Em?"

"Because."

"Morgan wants us; we're having breakfast with Ada and Karen. Reid's already at work."

Prentiss forced herself out of bed. That wasn't a surprise. She unlocked the deadbolt and let her in. "Think there'll be another case before the party?"

"Hopefully not another one that requires Spence to go out in person." JJ tossed her purse into a chair. "Would you hurry up, old woman? I'd like to spend every minute I can with my goddaughters."

"Don't be calling me old, JJ. Pot, meet kettle?" Prentiss checked her hair in the mirror one more time, making sure her roots weren't showing. "You know why I really hate you, Jayje, your blonde hair hides your gray."

"Oh, you have no idea how much gray I'm hiding, Em. Clairol has been my best friend ever since Henry got his art degree."

"Really, that long? Oh, you naughty girl, and here I thought I was the only one going gray."

Both women left the hotel room as they segued from hair dyeing to JJ's grandchildren.

Hotch was paging through the newspaper. Rossi leaned over his friend's shoulder. "He did some good work on that embezzlement case, Aaron."

It was the page 4 story, millions stolen from the company's employee retirement accounts via an almost unnoticeable paper trail of siphoning. "Why didn't Jack think he could tell me he was in the White Collar division?"

"Because you spent more than twenty years chasing serial killers. He chases paper trails. And you cast a long shadow, by doing what he does he's trying to get out of yours."

Karen Reid chose the most private table she could get in the little café. "This's been my favorite place ever since I opened my office."

Morgan pulled out chairs for the assembled ladies before he sat down with them. "You girls have any idea where Garcia's got to?"

JJ pursed her lips. "I haven't seen her since last night."

Ada flagged down a waitress while she added, "Aunt Penny went to the airport with Matt last night."

JJ turned around. "Yes, about SSA Lawrence, sit, talk."

Karen snorted at her twin sister. "Ada and Agent Lawrence have a crush on each other. Except Dad would kill him and the body would never be found."

Morgan laughed. "That, that's true."

Ada shook her head. "It's not a crush, we've been goofing around like that since, since, I don't know, at least since he joined the BAU. He used to be a tech analyst, that's when I originally met him."

As the group finished off breakfast, Morgan, Prentiss, and JJ didn't hesitate to cash in their senior citizen discounts. Karen led everyone outside. "How about you guys come back to the house? We've got keys and you know you want to."

Morgan and Prentiss got predatory grins on their faces. JJ shook her head. "Guys, we shouldn't. It is Reid's house, the girls are only visiting. You know he likes his privacy."

"But they invited us over, that makes it completely okay, JJ." Prentiss picked up her handbag. "After you, girls."

Garcia and Gideon snuck around the hotel for breakfast while she decided who they should talk to first.

She was loading up a plate from the complimentary breakfast when Rossi took that choice away. "Where is he?"

She turned around. "Who?"

"You know who. You went to the airport last night. Where's Jason?"

"Follow me. God, I hate profilers." Garcia loaded up a second plate for Gideon.

Gideon was still in the room Lawrence had checked him into last night. Garcia rapped on the door, than he opened it to see she wasn't alone. "David."

"Jason. Long time." Rossi pressed his way in as Gideon stepped away from the door.

"Likewise. Does anyone else know I'm here yet?"

"I think the younger of our oldies group went out to breakfast. I'd imagine Reid is at work." Rossi sat down on the chairs and examined his old colleague. "He's grown up, you know."

"I kept tabs, on what was going on with the team. Google, it's an amazing thing once you start using it."

"He's widowed with twin daughters."

"I know that, too, I'm hoping he's willing to see me."

Garcia smiled. "Everyone will be happy to see you, come on, we're joining everybody else for breakfast."

"Garcia, we just had-"

"You can never have too much breakfast. Come along, my elderly cupcakes!"

The moment the file from the Virginia state police hit his desk, Reid knew this would be bad. Agent Cassidy worried at her hair. "Seven victims in a mass grave two miles outside Roanoke city limits. They're all tourists who have been reported missing. They were partially disemboweled-"

Reid threw down the coroner's report. "And they each had a half-carat cubic zirconia solitaire shoved amongst their small intestines. It's him, Cassidy."

The communications liaison nodded. "And the number '7', on the lower back. We never told the press about that detail, sir."

He grabbed up the file and walked out of his office, trailed by Cassidy. "Lawrence! Round up your team, the Diamond Killer's back! Seaver!"

That was all it took for a morbid hush to come over the BAU as agents headed for the round table room. Nobody was going to forget the unsub that had managed to humiliate the BAU and completely and utterly pull one on Spencer Reid.

Karen unlocked the house and hurried into the living room to open the blinds. Prentiss looked around, and she tried not to feel happy that the place looked like the apartment that Reid had had before he'd gotten married. Books were on about half of the flat surfaces. Ada sighed as she grabbed a feather duster off the sideboard. "I just don't get how Dad spent his entire twenties as a bachelor and can't even dust."

JJ and Prentiss both started laughing as Morgan crossed the room to where the TV hutch was in a corner. "Oh, hey, Emily, look at this. Remember that crazy picture Rossi took of the wedding party at the reception, just before Reid and Austin bounced?"

"Oh my god, does Reid still have that?" Prentiss was turning colors as she crossed the living room.

JJ managed to keep ahead of the twins. "Lucky that wedding was in the afternoon."

Karen pushed up to the pictures on top of the TV hutch. "What happened that morning?"

Prentiss pointed at Morgan. "Your Uncle Derek and the rest of the guys got your dad drunk the night before the wedding, right after the rehearsal dinner."

Morgan struggled to defend himself. "In me, Hotch, and Rossi's defense, the bachelor party got interrupted for that case in Oklahoma. Reid needed to relax. And why I am the only one you're calling out by name."

JJ laughed. "You're here, and you were the best man. You know the rule. 'Anything stupid done by the groom is the best man's fault.' "

The reminiscing of the shrill ring of Karen's cell phone. She grabbed it out of her pocket and checked the number before answering. "Yeah, Dad, it's Karen."

"I will be at the party, but something's come up and I might not be home tonight, or for a couple of days. It's a case, and I have to go on this one."

"Dad! For God's sakes, didn't you get enough of this in your life?" Karen tried not to look at the team.

"It's the Diamond Killer, honey. He's back."

Karen nodded, knowing many questions would soon come. "Do what you have to, Dad. We'll see you when you get back. Bye-bye."

As she hung up, JJ pounced. "What was that about?"

"The Diamond Killer is back. Did you guys ever hear about that case? Anyway, it was one of the big ones he never closed."

Morgan crossed his arms. "Start talking, girls."

Garcia, Gideon and Rossi soon headed for Hotch's room. She knocked on the door.

In the room, he had his phone to his ear. "You want my retired input, Reid?"

"You do consulting work, Hotch, and I could use some fresh eyes on this. I'm going with Lawrence and his team to Roanoke. And before you say it, I know I'm too close to this investigation, believe me."

"I wasn't going to say anything, Reid." Hotch stood up to go answer the door.

"I am, but I have to catch this guy. He, well, he humiliated me as a unit chief, with the same agents I'm taking with me now. I'd like you and Rossi both to look at the case file, and remember that the entire profile my team and I wrote seven years ago was wrong."

"The entire profile?" Hotch opened the door and his jaw dropped to see Gideon standing with Rossi and Garcia. He immediately decided Reid didn't need to hear about this right now, and shushed the group while gesturing them in.

"Pretty much. The Diamond Killer stuck a ring in my nose, hooked a lead rope to it, and made sure we drew the conclusions he wanted us to draw. Once we committed to the profile, he spent a week proving us massively wrong. I'm going to catch this bastard this time, Hotch."

And Aaron Hotchner was almost sure he'd never heard Reid call anyone that before. "Fax the files, me and Dave will see what we can do. We'll get the rest of the team in on it, too."

"Have to go. If you guys see something that breaks this, I will get you and Rossi your standard consulting fees, budget or no budget. Gotta go." Hotch was a little surprised at how brusquely Reid hung up, but he'd been warned.

"Jason, it's been a long time between visits."

Gideon nodded. "That was Spencer?"

"He's getting involved in another case. What do you two know about the Diamond Killer?"

Rossi sat down and thought this discussion would go better with a drink. "I was watching that case. Had some thoughts, but - he's back, isn't he?"

Hotch nodded. "Reid would like us to consult, there could even be a fee in it. This one is personal for him."

Gideon put in some more of the embarassment the team had taken. "Having one of your agents kidnapped and dumped in a public park in her underwear will do that, not to mention being precisely potshotted, outside a police station, after you said on TV the killer was too disorganized for any sort of planned assault, not to mention-."

Rossi pointed to the door. "Until he sends us the case files, this conversation would go better with drinks."

Ada, Karen, Morgan, JJ, and Prentiss walked back into the hotel. Prentiss was shaking her head at the cleansed details the girls had. "This guy managed to completely run rings around Reid?"

Karen nodded. "The Diamond Killer is the only one that Dad gives the credit of the guy's nickname these days. He kidnapped Delolly and dumped her in her underwear in the Roanoke city park, mailed her service weapon and her badge back to Quantico, and left the bullets scattered around her."

Ada added. "And took potshots at them outside the police station. It was scary, we were pretty young still and Dad got hit, almost everybody did."

Garcia was giddily watching the three senior profilers pouring over the case file in an quiet corner of the hotel lounge. It was like the old days. Rossi had the original profile. "The unsub treated this like a laundry list of 'Things to Prove Wrong.' "

Gideon knew the key was the significance of the rings left in the victim's bodies. The unsub had lost a wife or fiancee, and somewhere the blame was on the victims. "Were Reid and his team wrong at the time, or did the unsub change his behavior in reaction to the profile? Ignore Spencer's conclusions in the report, we trained him. These victims are all over the board, guy's an omnivore."

"You don't change from highly disorganized to being able to kidnap a FBI agent in broad daylight, conduct a planned ambush on the same street as a police department, and send an entire doctoral dissertation on criminology and abnormal psychology to the special agent in charge in a short amount of time." Hotch shook his head. "The unsub led the team to make the conclusions he wanted them to make, so he could prove them wrong and humiliate them, it's as important as the murders themselves for him."

Garcia turned around and sucked in a breath when she heard the voices behind her. The other half of the reunion had come back.

"Gideon?" Morgan stared at the three, buried in a case file between them. There were so many things that needed said, but he settled for, "That the file on the Diamond Killer?"

Hotch gestured the rest of the group to the table. "Reid would like fresh eyes on it, even if they're our old ones. There might be a consulting fee in it."

Prentiss stepped up to look at the stapled stack of paper that was the perfectly formatted dissertation that the unsub had sent. "Oh, I'm sure we can break the case on someone who outmanuevered an entire team of young, up to date profilers with Reid leading them."

Gideon raised a hand. "In youth we learn; in age we understand."

Ada perked up. "Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach."

Morgan took the crime scene photos. "You are just like Reid, Ada."

_Roanoke, Virginia_

The team walked into the local police department. It was Round 2, and this time Reid had to admit he felt more confident inside to know that the friends he'd known for thirty years and some were involved, too, even at something of a distance.

Cassidy offered her hand to the case detective. "Agent Lynn Cassidy, we spoke on Skype. This is SSA Lawrence, our unit chief, SSAs Cooper and Delolly, SA Branthau and SA Harris; and our Section Chief Spencer Reid."

Detective Luke Braden shook Cassidy's hand. "Detective Braden. I've heard you've dealt with this sicko before?"

Lawrence nodded. "We encountered him seven years ago in Tallahassee, Florida, Detective."

Reid was already looking for their work space. "We're catching him this time, Lawrence."

He had wanted that grave found, that was the only reason it had been. Now the game was beginning again, and the lack of new players was disappointing, only the scrawny one who hid himself in the back was new, and he didn't look like any sort of challenge, just another example of the kind of trash he liked to hunt.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: This one might be a little rough, I'm also writing for NaNoWriMo 2011 this month and I pushed this piece out after I finished today's NaNo quota.

* * *

><p>The whole team had broken the elements of the photocopied FBI file down between them to let everybody apply their individual specializations to it.<p>

Gideon had the original profile in front of him, Prentiss was still reading the dissertation, and Morgan was looking unhappily at the victims. "The unsub's an omnivore. Men, women, black, white, Hispanic, he has no type, except they're all adults."

"These kills are not completely random, there's something in their lives that links these people and that is what draws the unsub to choose them. We find it, we find him." Gideon was sure of that.

Prentiss handed a page to Hotch. "Large chunks of the dissertation are plagiarized, I recognize sections of this from Rossi's older books and the ones you wrote recently."

Rossi took a look, leaning over Hotch. "Reid made note of that in the original case, they referenced the entire text against school records across the country. The only match on the text was a doctoral student at UCLA, but the name ended up being false and there weren't records anywhere else."

Morgan lined up coroner's photographs of the victims, both the bodies found in Roanoke and the bodies from Tallahassee. "A ghost. One who traveled 500 miles just to get the BAU's attention again."

Reminding them of their presence, Ada and Karen said it at the same time. "531 miles."

JJ and Garcia looked at the twins at the same time. JJ couldn't help herself. "You guys really did steal your dad's brain when you were born, didn't you?"

Ada thought a moment and nodded her head up and down. "Can we help you?"

Morgan tried to hide the gruesome pictures. Disembowelment was up there on his 'horrible ways to die' list. "I don't think Reid would want you girls seeing these."

"Just let me examine the dissertation." Ada looked at Prentiss. "I'm working on a PhD right now, I can give some valuable insights on it, even if me and Karen don't have Dad's training."

After a moment, she handed the photocopied sheets to Ada. "What does it tell you if large chunks of it were plagiarized?"

Karen blinked. "Somebody's lazy, wants to appear smarter than he really is."

Rossi had his notebook open. "But what if you _know_ the person reading it will recognize what you plagiarized, even before they check it. I think everybody here can agree Reid of all people would recognize excerpts from my books and Hotch's."

Morgan, Prentiss and JJ all three thought on that. It was JJ who said it first. "It's spite. The unsub didn't care whether or not Spence recognized it as blatant plagiarism."

Morgan argued back, giving a hand wave. "That doesn't make any sense. I do everything I can short of a banner ad in the newspaper to scream 'I am smarter than the FBI' and then I plagiarize the dissertation I send to the triple PhD unit chief?"

Prentiss moved her chair back. "But you plagiarize the books of two men that unit chief respects and looks up to, knowing enough about him to know that he'll recognize them instantly."

"That could be a coincidence. We don't know that this guy is doing this about Reid specifically. A lot of people would cite Rossi's books without knowing a damn thing about him or the team."

Gideon stopped the argument with one hand. "The dissertation was sent directly to Spencer, and the unsub traveled 531 miles to start killing again. It's about Reid and his team."

Garcia shivered. "The same agents he's got with him now. Oh my baby."

Harris was in the bathroom, he'd latched the stall shut behind him as he tried to get his heart to stop pounding. The first 100 days were always and absolutely unmitigated Hell, and he was only 60 days clean this time. This time. It hurt physically to think that. The longest he'd ever gone had been 170 days. One month to get it out of his system, and 20 weeks at the Academy.

That period of sobriety had gone done the toilet when he'd been posted in New York, right back at home, surrounded by the same people and same places he'd grown up in.

Cassidy and Branthau were organizing the latest information on the white board, while Lawrence and Reid established priorities.

The unit chief paced around the conference room they'd been given. "Something connects these seven people, we missed it in Tallahassee, but there has to be a connection."

Reid could name some vicious cases where the victimology was truly random. "Some people kill because they simply have to kill, Lawrence. Anyone will do."

"I know that, sir, but I don't feel that that is the case here. There's a connection."

Cooper and Delolly parked the SUV and got out to speak to the families of two of the victims from the mass grave. Cooper had a tablet computer in his hands as he read over the Roanoke detective's notes on the family. "Peter and Mary Ellen Bell, mother and father of Tracy and Tora Bell. They've already been informed and they know we were coming."

Delolly hugged herself, remembering their last encounter with this guy. She still didn't know why he'd left her alive, when he had butchered so many other people. The composite sketch off of her description had gotten them nowhere. "Right, we'll just ask some questions."

"Hey, lookit here." Cooper laid his computer on the driver's seat. "You're okay, aren't you?"

"Yeah, Cooper, I'm fine. I can handle this."

"Dana, we all know what happened. If you want to talk . . ."

"All of Quantico knows what happened. I don't want to talk about it, Arthur." She slammed the SUV's door and stomped off.

Cooper huffed out a breath and went after her. He knew Dana Delolly wasn't fine. Most of the legends of the BAU had gotten to kill the killer who had plagued them. Delolly's had gone free for seven years.

On the Bell's couch, Cooper took the lead. "We are so sorry for your loss, Mr. and Mrs. Bell, I can't imagine what you're going through."

Mary Ellen Bell dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "Well, it's, not as bad as it could be. The girls had been missing for some time, we, we knew the odds of them still being alive weren't good, I guess I already knew months ago my girls were dead."

She put her head in her hands and started to sob into the tissue while her husband put an arm around her shaking shoulders. Peter Bell looked helpless with what to do. "Anything we can do to help you and your team, Agent Cooper, we will. What do you need to know?"

Delolly stepped in. "Lifestyle, interests, friends, anything about your daughters. Something in their life made this man target them, and when we find out what, we've got him."

"They were students, model students at college. They were both so bright, Tracy was going to be a lawyer and Tora was studying literature, she wanted to write." Peter Bell stopped to collect himself.

Mary Ellen found enough of her voice to speak up. "They both had boyfriends, they were very popular but they were good girls, always careful and respected themselves." She started crying immediately again. "They were so careful, how could this happen?"

Delolly tried to comfort the mother. "Sometimes the world isn't fair, and no matter how cautious you are, horrible things happen. You can have a black belt in three martial arts and carry a gun,"

Cooper tried to make eye contact to stop her from talking as she continued.

"But even if you do everything right, terrible things still happen."

Mary Ellen looked up. "You? You were? But why did he kill my girls and not you?"

Cooper wanted to facepalm as the woman started sobbing again.

"I wish I knew, Mrs. Bell."

Harris was looking at the board, while Branthau worked on the geographical profile. "Wish to hell we'd borrowed Bellamy instead of Cassidy."

Harris blinked at his friend. "You're a lot better geographer than Bellamy, and you're really good with maps, like so much better than he is."

Branthau shoved two pushpins into the board, marking where two victims had been grabbed and a different color pin for the mass grave. "You can quit flattering me now. You okay?"

Harris nodded weakly. "I can do this."

"Coroner's and crime scene photos are on the other board. You were in the bathroom a long time, man."

Did _everybody_ know? He shivered again. Yes, they did. Sometimes he hated his teammates.

"I'm fine." Harris walked over to the crime scene photos. "You would know if I did anything because I wouldn't look like hell right now."

Branthau looked up and heaved a breath. "I hate to say this, but I can't make many conclusions until he dumps another body. The abduction sites are spread out all over the city, and they go back years. He moved here almost immediately after we didn't get him in Florida."

Reid walked in to check on the pair. "Then why did he wait this long to let the grave be found?"

Harris looked closer at the pictures. "They're in different states of decay, buried at different times over the past five years. How was the grave found, sir?"

"Anonymous tip from a pay phone."

The younger men both turned to look at their section chief. Harris blinked. "What's a pay phone?"

Spencer Reid seriously considered running back to Quantico on the spot and apologizing to Hotch and Rossi for every time he made them feel this old. "It's a phone you put coins in to use."

Branthau looked at the coroner's pictures, as he held a tablet in front of him to do the geographic profile of the abduction sites. "The victims died from blood loss, but there's some odd scarring here, you see it, sir?"

Reid looked at the picture of the fourth body from the grave, an unidentified man in his mid-fifties. No way, it couldn't be, it was in the wrong spot. And yet, he knew those scars. "Harris, take a look at this and tell me I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing."

The agent looked too and choked. "I need to see the bodies and their apartments."

Branthau tapper his Bluetooth. "Coop, it's Branthau. Ask the families if the victims had any history of intravenuous drug use."

"You think they're going to admit that, Branthau? Even if they know, they're not going to tell us." In the background, he could hear Delolly screeching about Cooper's driving.

Harris looked away from the coroner's pictures. "The families won't know, the victims will have hidden it so well they wouldn't imagine. If they know, they'll be ashamed and defensive, and it'll be obvious the drug user hasn't been back home in months if not longer."

Gideon looked around the table of retired profilers, a retired tech analyst with her computer in front of her on the hotel's wireless, and two twenty-something year olds. "All right, on the spot, what do we know about the unsub?"

Morgan started. "He's probably between the ages of thirty and fifty, white, highly intelligent, highly organized."

Prentiss picked up from there. "He'll have a severe inferiority complex, anyone who seems to be smarter than him imtimidates him and challenges him mentally to prove he's smarter. He's powerless in his everyday life, and the careful control of the abductions and dump sites lets him regain some of that power for himself."

Rossi added. "He's taken a variety of college level courses in psychology and criminology, but is unlikely to have a completed degree in anything, and will have been kicked out of at least one degree program for plagiarism. We'll find an extensive collection of books on the subject and a compiled history of news stories about Reid and his agents."

Hotch had one more thought to add, looking at the photographs of the diamond solitaire rings that had been shoved in the guts of the dead victims, and the cubic zirconia ones that were being used now, otherwise identical in cut and setting. "He lost a fiancee or a wife, in some kind of connection to whatever made him choose these victims, and he's suffered a significant financial setback since Tallahassee, he can't afford to use diamonds anymore."

JJ considered that point as she rotated her own rings. "What if it's not the same unsub? That's a pretty big thing to change, Hotch, even if he's in dire financial straits."

"We'll float the theory and our preliminary profile to Reid and his team in Roanoke."

Ada nodded. "And don't tell Dad me and Karen were involved, Uncle Aaron. He tries to keep Karen away from cases."

She rolled her eyes. "Just because I'm a defense attorney, Dad loves me as a daughter, hates me as a lawyer."

The team had the courtesy to look a little bashful.

She rolled her eyes. "That always annoys me, I walk into a police station and I get swamped in dirty looks. It really isn't right to hold it against people for invoking their Constitutional rights. I mean 'lawyering up' shouldn't be a dirty word."

Rossi effortlessly changed the subject. "Let's find a fax machine and send our profile to Reid."

The woman slammed her door behind her, keeping her ex-boyfriend from coming in by locking the door. "Erica, you slut! Open this door, I want to talk about you did!"

"What I did? What about what you did? I had sex with your dealer so he wouldn't kill you, you jerk! How much do you owe him?"

"Only a couple of thousand, Erica, I'm sorry, I have this, I don't want you to-"

Erica turned to the door when she heard the noise of a fight outside it. "Really funny, Nick. You think I'm going to open this door, just because you pound around a lit – tle."

Her heart started to pound as blood steadily seeped in under the apartment door. She yanked it open to face her ex's sliced open body in the hallway. And screamed.


	4. Chapter 4

Cooper, Branthau and Delolly were on the crime scene, looking down at the body of 27 year old Nick Dallard as the medical examiner did his job.

Hugging herself and still shell-shocked, Erica Lawson talked to the agents. "I was right inside my apartment! This is all my fault, if I hadn't slammed the door in his face he'd still be alive."

Cooper thought she was probably better off without the drug-shooting loser that lay dead in front of them, but he wasn't going to say it. "What was the fight about, Ms. Lawson?"

She bit her lip and looked anywhere but the three FBI agents in front of her. "I did a thing, with his dealer. Nick uses," she swallowed a sob, "Used heroin. He owed his dealer a lot of money, and he was going to shoot him if he didn't pay up. I went to his dealer and tried to make a deal."

"Who is his dealer, Ms. Lawson?"

"Harvey Two Nickel, scumbag who works the Skid Row, that used to be a nice neighborhood." Erica hugged herself tighter.

Delolly was working close to the M.E., as close as he'd let her, as the man pulled something from the back pocket of the deceased's jeans. Her eyes widened. "Ms. Lawson, what did Mr. Dallard do for a living?"

"I don't know, he always dodged the question and got really mad when I pushed. We met on the street, I used to hook, but I haven't done that in three years."

"Coop, you might wanna take a look at this." Delolly held up the opened wallet in her gloved hand and handed her partner a business card while she showed him the badge in the wallet.

Branthau took one look and put his hand to his forehead. "I can't believe this."

Erica leaned forward. "What? What is it?"

Cooper looked at the wallet and back at Erica. "Ms. Lawson, meet your boyfriend. Detective First Class Nikolai Dallard, Roanoke Narcotics Division."

Erica was struck dumb for a moment before finding language. "No fucking way."

Reid and Harris' expressions were unreadable as the three agents came back and explained the coroner's finding on Dallard.

"Detective Dallard had been using heroin and cocaine, the police union rules give cops enough of a heads up of when a drug test is coming that Dallard must have managed to get himself in condition to not piss hot." Cooper rolled his eyes.

Delolly picked up from there. "He has track marks all over his feet, legs, and torso, indicating somebody who had to hide his addiction and long sleeved shirts weren't cutting it anymore. Toxicology said he was high as a mother loving kite at the time of his death."

Branthau tacked photographs to the board. "And the signature matches the killings in Tallahassee and the bodies from the mass grave here in Roanoke. Dallard had a cubic zirconia ring shoved in amongst his GI tract post-mortem, with the number 7 carved into the lower back. The carving is shallow, considering the high-risk situation and victimology, the unsub had to work fast, Erica Lawson could have had a change of heart and opened the door to her boyfriend at any minute."

One of the local detectives rapped on the door frame of the conference room the BAU had taken over. "Chief Reid, you got a fax in from Quantico. There's more people to your team?"

"Those would be my consultants, former SSAs Rossi and Hotchner. Anybody else would have used Skype."

As Reid left the room, Lawrence looked at the coroner's report and Seaver, back and forth several times. "Are we seriously thinking that the victim being a drug user in law enforcement is a coincidence?"

Seaver shook her head. "That makes no sense, Matt." She checked her perimeter, but the rest of Lawrence's agents were debating elements of the profile nearby. "Harris was not a member of the team in Tallahassee, so why would this victimology mean anything?"

"Okay, he chose this victim. Erica Lawson's apartment building had a buzz in lock on the door that worked, Delolly checked. Somebody buzzed the unsub in and he went after Dallard specifically."

"Or Dallard was just in the hallway at the wrong time, it happens." Seaver paced and looked towards the junior agents.

"There's only one way to figure out if Dallard was stalked prior to being killed, or displayed any awareness that he was being watched. It's going to be ugly and unpleasant." Lawrence started to walk away to find the Roanoke police chief, then the narcotics division captain and get the name of Dallard's partner.

She sighed at his back. "That's the understatement of the century, Agent Lawrence."

Reid grabbed the files off the old fax machine in the back corner of the police station. Only Rossi would use a fax. He read over the team's conclusions, and the various supporting statements, subsidiary notes and alternate conclusions they'd added. "You guys forgot that he probably feels invisible in his normal life."

But he couldn't help himself, as he walked back to the conference room the Roanoke PD had given them, and pulled out his phone to call back to Quantico.

The team talked amongst themselves over lunch, nothing too heavy, nothing too deep.

JJ was handing out the inevitable pictures. "And here's Henry and his wife's new baby Ashleighnen, I have no idea where they got that name from though."

Garcia squealed as she handed JJ her own pictures. "Our first little mini-Lynch! I was going to email these as soon as I got them from the boy, but Cloud is an epic procrastinator, he finally sent me pictures the day after I left the farm to come back here. You are so lucky, Jayje, your kids still live vaguely nearby. Cloud decided him and my daughter-in-law were moving to California!"

Morgan laughed. "Twenty-two hundred miles to get away from Mama, you that bad a mother-in-law there, Babygirl?"

She huffed and pulled off her glasses. "I am the world's best mother-in-law, for your information, Derek Morgan."

Prentiss shook her head with a small smile. "We do come home eventually, PG, believe me. No matter how overbearing a mother we have."

She huffed even more. "I am not an overbearing mother!"

Hotch hit the conversation just then. "Of course you're not. Rossi and I just sent our profile off to Reid and his team."

Rossi's phone rang as he added, "Boy moved a long way."

She growled. "My son was not trying to get away from me. He got a better programming work offer in Los Angeles, that's all."

"David Rossi speaking." The entire group suddenly quieted, out of respect and wondering who had called.

"It's Reid. Is everybody else with you?" The younger man sounded very tired.

"They're with me, Reid, I'm putting you on speaker." Rossi hit the right key and laid his phone in the middle of the group.

"We've had another one, and he's just getting warmed up, Rossi. It was a cop, a narcotics detective with the Roanoke police department." There was a long pause, and the group didn't say anything, letting Reid talk. "The detective was an intravenous drug user. I sent Cooper and Delolly to talk to the dealer, and Lawrence is talking to his captain and his partner."

Rossi glanced at the stiff expressions on several faces. Finally, Hotch spoke. "You okay, Reid?"

"I'm fine, Hotch, this entire case is just personal for me." The team could hear muffled shouting in the background. "I have to go, Lawrence and the narcotics captain just got in a disagreement. Police captains don't seem to favor it when they're told one of their men is a drug abuser, was a drug abuser. I'll call back in a little while. Garcia, you got a computer with you?"

She grinned as she hurriedly put away the pictures of her grandson. "Of course I do, sweetums. Hit me good."

"Sending you the files on Detective Nikolai Dallard now. Crime scene, coroner, and my agents' first notes from the detective's girlfriend, Erica Lawson. She didn't know he was a cop, for starters. Rawlins is running Dallard's background back at the BAU."

Garcia watched as the email hit her box. "The Great Old Chiefs shall look over this and get back to you post-haste, Young Chieftain."

Reid gave a tired laugh. "Garcia, I wish Rawlins was half as cheerful as you are. I've got him background checking the entire police department. I think we all know from experience that Detective Dallard's colleagues had to have known he was using."

The phone clicked off as Hotch rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Rossi's arms were crossed. As many years as he had been with this group of people before he'd retired the second time, there were still moments when he wondered about the time before he'd joined them.

The two oldest men had an entire conversation with their eyes, then Hotch said to the group. "Look over the stuff Reid just sent us and start figuring what it changes or adds to the profile."

Morgan and Prentiss exchanged a look as they grouped tightly to read the data on Garcia's tablet.

Gideon paused a moment, almost about to follow Hotch and Rossi, before turning back to the files Reid had sent them. He'd sacrificed any grounds to say anything about Reid a long time ago and knew it.

Cooper and Delolly got out of the SUV and walked up to the large house where Harvey Two Nickel lived. Cooper whistled as he looked up. "Damn, think I went into the wrong career."

Delolly rolled her eyes. "Tell me about it."

Cooper banged hard on the door while Delolly let her hand rest on her gun. The door opened to a man in his late forties or early fifties. "Hello, can I help you?"

Cooper pulled out his credentials. "Agent Cooper, this is Agent Delolly. We'd like to speak to Harvey Two Nickel."

"Um, yeah, I'll go get him, agents. I'm Cory, for what it's worth." He walked off to retrieve his boss.

Lawrence was squared off with Narcotics Division captain when Reid approached. "Are you seriously trying to tell me, Agent Lawrence, that one of my men was part of the freaking problem?"

The unit chief bit his lip for a second. "We need to talk to his partner. What your other investigators did or didn't know isn't at issue here, and nobody is being witch hunted. We need to know if Dallard gave any indication of being a man that was being stalked or hunted prior to the murder."

There were times when Reid severely felt sympathy for old Erin Strauss. "Lawrence, go talk to Branthau and Harris about the geographic profile."

Lawrence was about to open his mouth to say that the two weren't even done with it, but soon changed his mind and walked away. Reid put himself next to the captain. "I completely understand what this is like for you."

The captain stalked off to his office. "You can come if you want, don't let me stop you."

Reid followed after the captain. "Days ago, one of my unit chiefs was shot and killed right through his so-called bulletproof vest. I hadn't even had a chance to talk to his widow before that mass grave was found."

The captain didn't look at Reid. "Well, I don't have to talk to the widow, do I? Just the crack whore that my heroin-shooting detective had as a girlfriend. Who didn't even know he was a cop."

"I've been there, too. Nikolai didn't deserve to die because of it, but if he was killed because of it, that can help us catch the murderer, Captain."

"His partner was Eric Nord, Detective Second. Nord swore to me already he didn't know anything."

Reid nodded. "We still need to talk to him, Captain. We are not trying to cast any aspersions on anyone."

Harvey threw one leg over the other as he regally gestured Cooper and Delolly to seats in his sprawling living room. "I presume you're here to talk about Niko, Agents?"

Cooper nodded. "Funny thing, narco detective owes you a lot of money, and he turns up dead. Big coincidence there, Mr. Nichols."

Harvey started laughing. "Come on, I'm not deaf, Agent Cooper. I heard about that mass grave. Do you really think I would have killed a _narcotics detective_ for owing me money? If Dallard hadn't been fish gutted, I was about to start turning some screws, my own personal wrench in the police department, pity that can't happen now."

Delolly leaned forward. "You probably knew him better than his colleagues, was there ever any sign of anyone targeting him, stalking him?"

Harvey shrugged. "My guys, mostly. I knew Niko was a cop before he knew I knew. I made very sure he wasn't working under before we'd sell to him. Funny as hell, actually, Agent Delolly. You ever seen a heroin addict who desperately needs a fix? They will do anything to get someone to give them what they need, they will sacrifice everything that used to matter to them. Career, family, self-respect, the respect of others, they'll alienate their friends and family and coworkers, all in the name of the next hit."

Cooper interlaces his fingers and set his chin on his hands. "Interesting, such a perspective, and yet you're the biggest dealer in Virginia."

"Allegedly."

Delolly looked around the house. "Big place for 'allegedly.' "

"That's a matter of opinion, Agent Delolly."

Standing up and pulling a business card, Cooper handed it over to Harvey. "If you think of anyone else, give us a call."

On the way back to the vehicle, Delolly sighed and brushed her hair out of her eyes. "He didn't have anything to do with the murder. If I was a drug dealer with a narc on the rope, I wouldn't kill him, like Nichols said, I'd use them to screw up investigations in the Narcotics Division."

"Maybe Law'll get more from Dallard's partner."

Hotch and Rossi had gone as far as Hotch's hotel room. "Honestly, I always figured you knew, Dave."

"Not in so many words. Still, he knew the mother in that kidnapping case in 2011 was using, he's refused narcotic painkillers ever since I've known him. Think the unsub knows?"

Hotch shook his head. "I don't see how, somebody would have to have been close back then to know."

"Or obsessed." Rossi reached for the hotel room door. "We need to look at Reid's entire case history, including the years we worked with him. I would bet he has met this unsub before, and this man feels he has something to prove to Reid."

"That's a lot of cases, Dave."

"Tell me about it." Rossi walked out of the room. "I don't have the kind of memory Reid does, and nobody else here does. We're going to have to request our own case files."

Hotch followed. "That'll be a pain without Reid's say-so. Nobody's gotten a successful FOIA request on the FBI in fifteen years."

"We both consult, we share our conclusions, he'll authorize access to the back files. We aren't dealing with Erin here, Aaron."

Nord was stiff as a fireplace poker as he turned a cup of coffee in his hands while facing Reid and Lawrence. "I did not know Nick was, you know. I would have reported him, I would have. Made him get help."

Lawrence laid a hand on the detective's shoulder. "We're not saying you did, but we have to know if Detective Dallard was just in the wrong place at the wron time, or if our unsub picked him deliberately. Can you think of anyone that might have been following him, watching him? Did he ever give any indication he felt like he was in danger?"

Nord shook his head and sipped the coffee. "Nick was quiet, you know, didn't talk much. He had a good record back in robbery/homicide, but over here, I guess considering what he was doing this was a horrible position for him. I knew he had a girl, just by observation, but he'd deny it if I asked. I figured he was just trying to keep a private life private, you know?"

Reid picked it up. "Never any sign he was in trouble then?"

"I wish I'd seen something, honestly I do, Agent, but I didn't. There was never anybody and getting anything out of Nick about his personal life was like pulling an alligator's teeth. For good reason, now, I guess." Nord stood up. "If there's nothing else, I have to go through me and Nick's caseload."

"One more thing, actually. You're not originally from Virginia, are you?" Nord blinked and took a step backward. "It's your accent, you have a vague hint of a Latin-derived language in your speech. English isn't your first language."

He nodded. "Wow, yeah, actually, I moved here from Miami, way too violent down there for me, I thought Virginia'd be less violent."

"Actually, Detective Nord, while violent crime is more visible in large cities like Miami, very few places are truly 'safer' than others. You can find evil everywhere." Reid stood up and tried to stretch a stiffened old knee. As Nord left, Reid yanked his phone off his hip and dialed.

"Rawlins here."

"You got those backgrounds yet?"

"Not complete, but I started with Detective Dallard's fellow narcos, you want 'em now?"

"Send everything to our tablets, Rawlins."

"Sure thing, anytime, Chief." Rawlins hung up and Reid put his phone away.

Lawrence looked behind him as Nord walked away. "You can't possibly be thinking- Chief, there's no way the Diamond Killer would be stupid enough to kill this close to home."


End file.
